Zero alerts

Friday, May 13, 2005

Meanwhile, PA President Mahmoud Abbas keeps warning that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wants the PA to force a Palestinian civil war by insisting that the PA use force against the Hamas and other groups that meanwhile have signed onto the Egyptian-brokered ‘lull’ while Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz are insisting that without such action, Israel won’t be handing over any more prisoners or moving out of any more PA cities and towns.

It might all be part of the jockeying leading up to the planned Abbas meeting with President George W. Bush. It might also be part of the domestic jockeying on both sides: Sharon is trying to shore up his Rightist credentials as the disengagement approaches; Abbas’s Fateh is in a tough election race against an ascendant Hamas that might not be strong enough to win control of the PA government, but could become a powerful opposition in the Palestinian Legislative Council after the July elections there. On both sides of the Green Line, even though the majorities say they want peace and quiet, tough talk toward the other side remains popular.

Schiff quotes defense sources, but in Yedioth Ahronoth, Ofer Shelach gets outgoing commander Gadi Eisencott on the record as saying that there are ‘zero’ terror alerts this week in the West Bank. Eisencott says it has become ‘a conditioned reflex’ to say that there will be another round of violence and indicates that it is in Israel’s power to do whatever it can to prevent that from happening, by offering hope to the other side. ‘I can only say that those who don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel will hurry to light a fire,’ he told Yedioth.

And in Gush Katif, about 20,000 people spent their Independence Day holiday visiting the 1,500 families due for evacuation this summer, in what one reporter called ‘a dress rehearsal’ for the protest planned when the disengagement is slated to begin, apparently in mid-August (though that has not been officially decided yet).

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